A.: If you tend to make infrequent Amazon purchases that exceed $25, the service is probably not for you. (Spending $25 or more will get you free shipping, even without a Prime membership.) Likewise, if you get your e-books from Barnes & Noble, Apple or Kobo, the free Kindle book will not benefit you much. If you already subscribe to Netflix or Hulu, you have access to a wider selection of unlimited streaming video than what Amazon Prime offers.
Also in 2006, Amazon introduced Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), a virtual site farm,[93] allowing users to use the Amazon infrastructure to run applications ranging from running simulations to web hosting. In 2008, Amazon improved the service by adding Elastic Block Store (EBS), offering persistent storage for Amazon EC2 instances and Elastic IP addresses, and offering static IP addresses designed for dynamic cloud computing. Amazon introduced SimpleDB, a database system, allowing users of its other infrastructure to utilize a high-reliability, high-performance database system. In 2008, Amazon graduated EC2 from beta to "Generally Available" and added support for the Microsoft Windows platform.[94]

Amazon FreeTime Unlimited offers unlimited access to 13,000 kids' books, movies, TV shows, educational apps, and games. For Prime members it's $2.99/month for a single child or $6.99 for a family of up to four children. Parents can set controls like time limits and content filters, and personalize the experiences of each child profile. It's available on Fire Tablets (books, videos, apps), Kindle eReaders (books), and Android phones and tablets (books, videos).

The company launched amazon.com Auctions, a web auctions service, in March 1999. However, it failed to chip away at the large market share of the industry pioneer, eBay. Later, the company launched a fixed-price marketplace business, zShops, in September 1999, and the now defunct partnership with Sotheby's, called Sothebys.amazon.com, in November. Auctions and zShops evolved into Amazon Marketplace, a service launched in November 2000 that let customers sell used books, CDs, DVDs, and other products alongside new items. As of October 2014, Amazon Marketplace is the largest of its kind, followed by similar marketplaces from Sears, Rakuten and Newegg.